Think On It

Your Red Carpet

February 21st, 2007

Who knows what feels like that to you? It could be a special dinner where you will meet new people, or someone’s family or an inaugural ball. We do remember proms and our first dances, don’t we?

The Telegraph online publishes some of the most interesting and complete style and fashion pages I know. This week they have a couple of pages I really liked. The first set is about Helen Mirren. She is sixty-two, an age which many people think means if you haven’t given up you’re missing a reality check or two. I consider that utter nonsense, and so does Mirren. Helen Mirren has one red carpet night after another all over the world. Here is a page that shows the difference having a stylist has made to her. Lucky us! She pays, we get the advice for free. Click through to the photos that show how she used to dress and how she dresses now. Use the information, because unless you are Bjork, it applies also to you in red carpet circumstances. It could also translate to the everyday things you wear to the supermarket. Why even own a sweatshirt that makes you look like a fabric apple? Why not make that into a gym bag and buy a washable sweater with a shape that flatters yours?

The other page made me cringe. It’s about mirrors in changing rooms. I remember all too well shopping at stores where the space, the lighting and most of all the mirror guaranteed that if you did not fall to the floor blubbering in grief over your lost youth and shape, you’d found exactly what you should wear. Changing room mirrors are almost always cheap. They at best reflect what you look like from too close up in rotten lighting. At worst they distort you, giving you an elongated neck and wavy, shortened legs. Some places have fat mirrors and some have thin mirrors. We know that, no matter that Professor Gardner says it isn’t true. It is true. The shop where I buy lots of things has three mirrors: one fat, one thin and one pretty accurate but with nasty fluorescent lighting. I am forced to walk all over the store to get an averaged impression of “does this make me look” and use your own word at the end of that.

If, by chance, you are thinking of installing a mirror in your own house, here’s what I know from my former life as a designer. Buy the equivalent of 1/4″ clear float glass. Mount it on MDF to be sure it is stable. What else you do to it is up to you, the rest is just decoration. If, however, you want a relatively happy life as well as a really good look at yourself, use halogen flood lamps in the lighting of you, not the mirror. It will show your flaws, if you have any, but it will not drain your complexion of color and make you look like Marilyn Manson.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, Fashion, Heroes, Beauty